Cardew, Michael

First name: 
Michael
Initials: 
M.
Surname: 
Cardew
Year of birth: 
1901
Birthplace: 
Wimbledon, London
Country of birth: 
Great Brittain
Working period: 
1923
Year of death: 
1983
CV: 

Michael Cardew is born in Wimbledon, London in 1901. He is the fourth child of Arthur Cardew, a civil servant, and Alexandra Kitchin, the eldest daughter of G.W.Kitchin,  the first Chancellor of Durham University. His family has a holiday home in North Devon, where Arthur Cardew collected Devon country pottery. Cardew first saw this pottery being made in the workshop of Edwin Beer Fishley at Braunton and learned to make pottery on the wheel from Fishley's grandson, William Fishley Holland. He gained a scholarship to read Classics at Exeter College, Oxford. Already preoccupied with pottery, he graduated with a third class degree in 1923.
Cardew was the first apprentice at the Leach Pottery, St.Ives, Cornwall, in 1923. He shared an interest in slipware with Bernard Leach and was influenced by the pottery of Shoji Hamada. In 1926 he left St Ives to restart the Greet Potteries at Winchcombe in Gloucestershire. With the help of former chief thrower Elijah Comfort and fourteen year-old Sydney Tustin, he set about rebuilding the derelict pottery. Cardew aimed to make pottery in the seventeenth century English slipware tradition, functional and affordable by people with moderate incomes. After some experimentation, pottery was made with local clay and fired in a traditional bottle kiln. Charlie Tustin joined the team in 1935 followed in 1936 by Ray Finch, who bought the pottery from Cardew and worked there until he died in 2012. The pottery is now known as Winchcombe Pottery.
Cardew married the painter Mariel Russell in 1933. They had three sons, Seth (b. 1934), Cornelius (1936-1981) and Ennis (b. 1938).
In 1939, an inheritance enabled Cardew to fulfill his dream of living and working in Cornwall. He bought an inn at Wenford Bridge, St Breward, and converted it to a pottery, where he produced earthenware and stoneware. He built the first kiln at Wenford Bridge with the help of Michael Leach, Bernard Leach's son. It was fired only a few times before the outbreak of war, when blackout restrictions brought work to an end. In 1950 an Australian potter, Ivan McMeekin, became a partner and ran the pottery while Cardew was in Africa. McMeekin built a downdraught kiln and produced stoneware there until 1954. 
Wenford Bridge Pottery did not make enough money to support Cardew and his family, and in 1942 he accepted a salaried post in the Colonial Service as a ceramist at Achimota School, an élite school for Africans in the Gold Coast (Ghana). Although Cardew's main motivation for taking the post was financial, he had become convinced (partly though his reading of Marx) that there should be a closer relationship between the studio potter and industry.
In 1945 Cardew moved to Vumë on the River Volta where he set up a pottery with his own resources. He struggled with difficult clay and kiln failures for three years and later judged the Vumë pottery to have been unsuccessful, but its products are among his most highly regarded pots.
He returned to England in 1948 and made stoneware pottery at Wenford Bridge. In 1951 he was appointed by the Nigerian government to the post of Pottery Officer in the Department of Commerce and Industry, during which time he built and developed a successful pottery training centre at Abuja in Northern Nigeria. As a result of Cardew's extensive contact with and admiration of African pottery, his later work shows its influence. He returned to Wenford Bridge on his retirement in 1965.
Through his contact with Ivan McMeekin, in 1968 he was invited by the University of New South Wales to spend six months in the Northern Territory of Australia introducing pottery to the aborigines. He travelled in America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, making pots, demonstrating, writing and teaching.
He wrote Pioneer Pottery, an account of pottery-making based on his experiences in Africa, which assumes that the potter will have to find and prepare his own materials and make all his tools and equipment, and an autobiography, A Pioneer Potter.
Bernard Leach said that Cardew was his best pupil. He has been described as "one of the finest potters of the century and one of the greatest slipware potters of all times." The decorative style of his slipware is usually trailed or scratched and is free and original. The stoneware he made at Vumë and Abuja is similarly well regarded. There are collections of his work in museums in Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
He was appointed MBE in 1964 and OBE in 1981. He was due to be knighted at the time of his death. He died in Truro in 1983 (text from Wikipedia.org).

See Michael Cardew in a movie dated 1984 (source You Tube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKqoCcg0jek

Pictures: Portrait 1936 (source IMAGNO-Austrian Archives); portrait 2 and 3 (source: Michael Cardew -see Bibliography); large teapot, 1930s (source: collection vads.ac.uk); lidded jar, ca. 1938 (source: MAAK Auction London); rare stool, 1970s (source: MAAK Auction London); early signature (source: studio pottery.com); signature 1970s (source: MAAK Auction London). 

Bibliography: 
  • Michael Cardew, a collection of essays with an introduction by Bernard Leach and contributions by Michael Cardew, Ray Finch, John Houston and Katharine Pleydell Bouverie, Crafts Advisory Committee, 1976.